I upgraded recently from a Mid 2010 MBP to a Mid 2015 retina pro with ssd. I find it much faster in all aspects, I have not tried thunderbolt card reader so can't say much on speed. I use the usb 3.0 pro workflow readers and found them to be much faster then my FW readers. If your 2009 MBP was powerful enough for the apps you are using now then the new iteration of MBP's will work just fine.

I was in a similar delima and went with the 2016 Macbook. This replaced a 2009 MBP.

The Macbook has worked out fairly well for me. I knew I wanted a smaller system than a 15" screen and I do miss some of the screen real estate at times, but it hasn't disappointed me yet power wise.

I got the M5 processor over the M3 as it does make a difference. I spent part of a day at Best Buy once running GeekBench on several Mac laptops to get some idea. This is at least twice as fast as my old laptop, even after I put an SSD in it. There are times were the Macbook will process a file in Photoshop faster than my 3 year old 21.5" iMac.

If you are looking at a more portable laptop, don't discount the Macbook. Just make sure you go with the more powerful processor.

I have a mid 2014 MacBook Pro. I work file with PM. There are some events when I ingest upwards for 100,000 photos on a weekend and the MBP is fine. I ingest to the internal SSD plus an external thunderbolt drive. No problem at all.

The recently released Mid 2017 12" MacBooks have the option for i5 and i7 processors which should perform much better with PM. The previous generation of the machine was only available with Intel's "m" series processors. You can also now get 16 GB of RAM instead of just 8 GB.

That said, I've never used PM on one of them but figure it was worth pointing out that the current model offers better processor options than the previous model.